Even the most cynical observer has to be disturbed by the latest results of the annual Specialized High School Admissions Test, which governs admissions to the city’s top public high schools including Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, Brooklyn Tech and others.
Just 10% of all offers to the city’s eight specialized public high schools went to black or Latino students this year, a slight drop from the year prior. This is an abysmal number, one that does not reflect the makeup of the city or its public school system.
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Numerous possible solutions — changing the admissions process for these schools, requiring more affordable test prep services for underserved students, creating new borough-based specialized high schools, expanding tutoring services in targeted communities, improving access for public middle school valedictorians and salutatorians, and everything in between — have been discussed in recent years.
Each has its own potential merits, but the best way to fix this flawed process is to ensure that black and Latino students are afforded the best possible education options from the moment they walk into a public school building.
To do that, we must expand gifted and talented programs throughout the city, and mandate that students in public pre-K programs get screened for G&T admissions.
Right now, they’re on the outside looking in. Roughly a quarter of students participating in gifted and talented programs are black and Latino, even though that population makes up about two thirds of all city public school students. The City Council’s Black, Latino and Asian Caucus have also noted that black and Latino participation in gifted programs has decreased in recent years.
These numbers look even worse when you focus on specific neighborhoods. In District 7, which covers the largely Latino communities of the South Bronx, just 87 students were tested for a gifted class last year, and just six qualified. That’s despite the fact that 1,477 4-year-olds there were in universal pre-K.
In the largely African-American communities that make up Brooklyn’s District 23, such as East New York and Brownsville, 94 students were tested, with only nine qualifying for a gifted class. That’s out of 831 who were in universal pre-K there.
In the Bronx’s District 12 and Brooklyn’s District 16, the numbers were similarly low, and none of those four districts were home to their own gifted and talented kindergarten class this year.
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Compare those numbers to Manhattan’s District 2, which covers some of the higher income neighborhoods in the city on the East and West sides of Manhattan. Nearly 1,700 students took the gifted test last year; 751 qualified for a class.
We refuse to believe that only affluent areas of this city produce students that merit inclusion in these programs. If more students are tested for gifted classes, more students will qualify for them, and more students — especially in underserved communities — will have the opportunity to do the highest level work in their own neighborhoods.
Parents in this city have long considered enrollment in a gifted and talented class to be the first step on the long road to a specialized high school, and with good reason. Children in these classes are exposed to a more rigorous, advanced curriculum, especially in subjects like math and science that are the core focus of the specialized high schools.
STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) jobs are among the most lucrative in our nation’s workforce, and reports indicate that roughly one-third of all new job openings in New York State are for STEM positions. Yet only about 13% of American STEM workers were black or Latino in 2011.
The systemic failure to adequately prepare black and Latino students for these careers begins in the earliest grades — which is why we should mandate that all kids attending public pre-K be tested for a gifted class.
Diaz and Adams are borough presidents of the Bronx and Brooklyn, respectively.
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